Ffg's Star wars: Were they just being lazy using the WFRP3 engine or do they think they're on to something?
Here's the deal: FFG's new Star Wars RPG uses the Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay 3rd edition engine. I'm a fan of WFRP3 and play it weekly, but considering the flop it was commercially, was it really a smart idea to use that same system again?
Yes, I know they're not using the excess of cards that WFRP3 had, but is the license alone going to be enough to gather success in the face of the WFRP3 losses?
This brings us to: does a game system really even matter or is it really just about marketing?
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System matters to good game play experience. System matters to fans of specific systems.
Pathfinder's launch was a brilliant move - they managed to capture a significant chunk of the people who didn't want to change games. However, Pathfinder is functionally a six credit college course on system mastery; calling some of the people who optimize in PF rules lawyers is vastly overstating the amount of capability of real lawyers.
Systems take time and energy to develop. Systems can be brilliant matches to settings, or they can be adequate matches to settings, or they can be horrible hack jobs.
However, as Paizo has demonstrated, people buy games for setting first, rules familiarity second...and marketing only nukes the rules advantage if the rules system is very very bad.
For certain games, system matters more - for example, Fiasco will never have a d20 version...but for Star Wars? Nope. It'd have to be a steaming pile of poo to negatively impact sales.
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One way to look at it is they got a crash course in what works and what doesn't with the Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay 3rd edition engine. Maybe they can make a winner this time around. I agree with AdAstra on this one the system would have to be really bad for this to fail. Star Wars should sell itself. Then again people are throwing their hands up over dice so who knows?
FFG's Star Wars so far (to me) seems to be a younger hotter sexier cousin to the Warhammer fantasy role-play third edition engine (which I also enjoy...but it can be a labor of love). Overall it has played out pretty well and I've been able to run some Google+ Hangouts games that certainly seemed Star Warsy (to me).
The Star Wars fan base likewise, is so gargantuan that even if fantasy flight games only captured a small fraction of that population they still have a winner on their hands. We can't compare hard statistics, but I think it is safe to say that Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay has far fewer rpg followers than the various iterations of Star Wars. Only time will tell whether or not this new "gamey-dice" game engine is the next best thing, or if it's just something FFG will ride into the ground (or until they replace Jay Little any number of other outcomes).